LINGER, LINGER LITTLE STARS MORE AND MORE NOBODIES ARE GETTING FAMOUS AND IGNORING THAT 15-MINUTE TIMER

For sure, we leave 1997 with more celebrities than we had going into it. Think of it this way: If fame were a corporation, it would be the largest employer in America. And like any bloated corporation, it should downsize. But not enough celebrities are fired outright though Cybill Shepherd's once-hot comeback show, "Cybill," was put on hiatus. Rather, they take hits, and for a time appear vulnerable until they do the next thing to woo their audience back. No one thinks, for instance, that it's over for Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Reiser or Jay Leno, just because each wrote a book that bombed this year. Bruce Willis and Richard Gere failed to draw mega-crowds to "The Jackal," and Gere failed again with "Red Corner.

" Kevin Costner may have succeeded in torpedoing his career with "The Postman.

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" Probably not, though. In fact, one of the problems with fame today is that it's impossible to thin its ranks. The famous don't retire and more people get famous by the minute. "If you define fame in the ways we do now, only four farmers in Arkansas aren't famous while every woman in a red dress is," says Joe Queenan, contributing editor to Movieline magazine and author of "If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble.

" There are now so many famous people it's impossible to recognize them all. This has, at minimum, changed the conversation at the water cooler. An example: Celebrity-based conversation from yesteryear: "Did you catch so and so on Carson?

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" "No. What did he say?

" Celebrity-based conversation from today: "Did you catch so and so on Letterman?

" "No. Who is he?

" In fact, the language of celebrity, which used to be common-speak and enjoyable for many of us, has fractured. Why is that? It isn't only that we are spawning celebrities at an unprecedented rate. A complicating factor is that these days celebrities come in so many different persuasions. "In a previous generation what we had in common was, well, a bunch of white people," says Joshua Gamson, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale and author of "Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.

" "Whose stars were those?. . . . This has to do with a diversifying population and a recognition that we are now multi-cultural.

" But if we were only being asked to broaden celebrity to embrace anyone who crossed an ethnic/racial/class divide into the mainstream, hey, that would be easy! What really makes celebrity so damn confusing is its balkanization. Just as the city has its districts Flower, Diamond, Garment, etc. so does fame. Think youth, television, sports, fashion, downtown, street, publishing, etc. And then etc. again, because there are so many of them. Each of these subgroups has a genuine need for its own celebrities. For as intrusive or frivolous as celebrity can seem, it actually serves a purpose beyond hustling sneakers. Why icons click "Celebrities provide a shifting psychoanalysis of ourselves," says Leo Braudy, the Bing professor of literature at the University of Southern California and the author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.

" Celebrities embody what we value at the moment and their fame broadcasts to the tribe what those values are. They are our code, our quick-speak as to the way to be now. Celebrity also serves the useful function of allowing us to create gods and goddesses who are then within reach Hollywood is at least closer than Mount Olympus. We can move them across the celebrity landscape the way children manipulate action figures. If they behave the way we want, fine, and if not, we'll send Barbara Walters out to make them cry. Oprah, even, if we have to. Certainly, though, such icon manufacturing was once a far simpler matter. Simplicity itself, in fact. More stars in store "Back in the '50s, there was a great dream of cultural homogenity," says Harold Schechter, professor of English at Queens College. "Which is why Superman is such a great American symbol. Two immigrant Jewish kids dreaming of assimilation created Clark Kent, the ultimate WASP . . . You can see how all the celebrities of that era symbolized that dream. "But now you have all these different constituencies. We are living in an era that celebrates difference.

" For now and some time to come, then, all of our many we's will be manufacturing celebrities in their own image, sending them out then to mix in the larger celebrity culture. Analogies can be made to the Tower of Babel, but that may be premature. "It will resimplify," Braudy promises. "In learning all this foreign knowledge, it seems like babble at first . . . but gradually the whole process slows down and you come to know it.

" There is an alternative scenario, though its appeal is limited to those of us who only wish fame were more fickle. Joe Queenan predicts: "A day will come when it shakes out and only the really, really famous are going to be left standing.